


Like Brother and Sister

by thesorceressfromthelake



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Catholic Guilt, Closeted Character, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Past Relationship(s), Unrequited Love, hints of liv/rollins but not enough for me to justify putting it in a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 12:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11874456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesorceressfromthelake/pseuds/thesorceressfromthelake
Summary: It hits Amanda like a ton of bricks, all at once, like it's been creeping in the back of her mind the whole time and suddenly it just had to hit her. Oh god. This kid has a crush on me.Amanda would just like a normal, possibly familial, relationship with a co-worker for once in her life. This doesn't feel like too much to ask.





	Like Brother and Sister

**Author's Note:**

> All thanks possible to Robin Hood (kjack8), who has been very kind with betaing and encouraging me, and without whom this would not exist.
> 
> I always thought what would bring me back to the world of fanfiction would be Person of Interest but no, it was the SVU fandom.

“The Lieu asked me to go check in on Barba, so I am leaving you with this paperwork. Have fun, Rollins,” Carisi smiles as he says this, incredibly stupid accent lilting up. And with that, Carisi saunters away. Amanda glares at his back, trying to suppress a grin at how frickin’ cocky Carisi can get at times. That is until she turns back around in her desk to see Fin giving her that look again, and her smile turns into a scowl. 

It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and Amanda is too tired to be dealing with this. Fin has been giving her this look, a look that says ‘are you fucking kidding me Rollins’ and ‘are you doing this again’ and ‘do I have to give you the don’t-take-your-coworker's home speech again’. Amanda’s honestly impressed he can convey so much with one glance, but Fin has powers that she does not understand. 

He’s been giving her this look about once a day since the reality show case, where Carisi brought up the fact that they’d been watching Heart’s Desire together and apparently, Fin has translated ‘Carisi and I watch reality shows together’ to ‘Carisi and I are fucking’. She guess she can’t really blame him, not after Nick, not after him having to deal with her-and-Nick, but she doesn’t like feeling jumpy when she hasn’t done anything wrong. Every time she and Carisi have a conversation, or joke around, Fin’s side-eying her and he can be amazingly expressive at times.

Amanda’s sick enough of the whole thing to try and set Fin straight. “What are you lookin’ at me like that for? It really ain't like that.”

Fin doesn’t play dumb, though he could have, easy. “A’right, alright. Just checking in, Rollins.”

Amanda snorts but she feels a weight go off her chest. If Fin says he’s dropped it, that means he’s dropped it. She knows him well enough for that. She kind of wonders if he’s gonna say something to Carisi, but then, he and Carisi aren’t tight the same way Fin and her are. Fin and Carisi were never partners and, even if it’s not official anymore, she still kinda thinks of Fin as her partner. She can’t get too annoyed. She just has to remind herself--he’s only looking out for her. Between Declan and Nick, she doesn’t have the best track record, but she’d think that he’d know her better than to think Carisi’s her type. She just wishes her partner didn’t think she was this easy.

The whole thing starts to look a bit funny, though, a few weeks later. Carisi is great: he watches television with her, helps watch Jesse, cooks her dinner, and she gets why someone on the outside would think they were dating. But their relationship is astonishingly platonic. Amanda thinks Carisi must be what it’d be like to have a little brother, a little brother that would be much easier to deal with than her actual little sister, who’s more like a hurricane than a person sometimes. She loves Kim so much, but she wishes her family could just be easy. 

Carisi is easy. Carisi’s almost like family. Carisi talks about his sisters sometimes, well, all the time, and he talks about cooking for them when he was little, when his mom wasn’t home and his older sister didn’t want to do it. Amanda figures that she’d be insulted by some guy treating her like his sister, except she feels the same way about him. That’s why she thinks he’d find what Fin’s been doing funny too. 

“You remember back about the Heart’s Desire case?”

Carisi’s cooking, some type of pasta, she hasn’t asked yet what he’s making, and she’s just calmed down Jesse enough to sit her in her high chair and make faces at her. There’s some cop show on in the background (they’re taking a break from reality television). It’s a perfectly nice evening. He nods, slow, not taking his eyes off the pasta for a second. “Fin’s been makin’ some pretty dumb assumptions.” He half turns to her but doesn’t take his eyes off his cooking. Carisi’s not so easily distracted as some people think he is.

“Thinks we’re datin’ or somethin’. Of all the stupidest things in the world.” She wishes she had a salad, so she could stab a fork at it. “Don’t worry. Set him straight on the whole thing.” Which might be exaggerating a bit, she hardly said two words to him but she thinks Fin got the point. “Honestly, there’s something really ridiculous about the two of us dating. There ain’t any sorta universe where we’re each others types. Idea’s kinda funny, if you think about it.”

And Carisi. Carisi freezes. His shoulders tense up and he’s turned away from his cooking to look at her and the emotion on the face is hard to read for a second until Amanda rolls it around in her head to place it and comes up with shame. 

That doesn’t fit at all. Amanda brought up the idea of the two of them dating and she expected him to laugh it off, find it as funny as she does, but what she gets from him is fear and shame. Like there’s something that he doesn’t want her to know and she’s just stumbled on it and she can’t figure out what that would be and what that would have to do with dating. He lets out a laugh but it’s too late, he sounds uncomfortable and everything spins for a second.

It hits Amanda like a ton of bricks, all at once, like it's been creeping in the back of her mind the whole time and suddenly it just had to hit her. Oh god. This kid has a crush on me, her mind's saying, and she can't shut it out no matter how much she wants those words to crawl back where they came from. She stares at him. He doesn’t look ashamed anymore, he’s just paying attention to his cooking, but she knows when somebody’s hiding something and her head hurts and her heart hurts to think Carisi’s hiding from her.

“That is kinda funny.” Carisi’s smiling now but she saw what she saw. She’s a detective. Carisi’s a good liar; she’s seen him undercover, in interrogations, enough times to know how good he is at faking emotions and opinions. Amanda just didn’t think he’d end up lying to her.

Carisi describes what he’s making to her, something with mushrooms and meatballs and cream sauce, but her mind’s running and she tunes him straight out. She doesn’t think she wants to eat what Carisi’s making her and she knows it’s dramatic but she feels like she’s brought him here under some kind of false pretense. Normally she’d be saying something, confront him over...whatever but she can’t think of what to say. It’s not like Carisi would be the first guy to become friends with her with the hopes of something else, but she wasn’t expecting this and doesn’t know how to react.

Amanda doesn’t say anything while they eat, and neither does Carisi, which is a first, not even when she gets some sauce on her shirt, and he leaves quickly after dinner. 

They nod at each other at work, and talk about their new case (a PO raping a former inmate officer, honestly could things get harder around here), but that’s it. Carisi’s avoiding her. Or she’s avoiding Carisi. Or Carisi’s avoiding her because she’s avoiding Carisi. It’s hard to figure out who started this nonsense but Amanda thinks it might have been her. Fin watches them from his desk, eyebrows raised somewhere between ‘what’s going on’ and ‘what did I tell you’. Amanda wants to cuss him out, ask him if he’s happy he’s right, but she still wants to be wrong.

Carisi has a thing for her, and she’s been too busy thinking about him like her new kid brother to even notice. She just wishes she hadn’t misread the situation as much as she did. Amanda knows she shouldn’t blame him, not really. She’s been there--she was gone over Nick a long time before she should have been and frankly he’s had more of a reason to develop a thing for her than she had for Nick. They’ve spent so much time together; Carisi’s basically raising her daughter. She wants to shout at herself for being so stupid.

This is fine. There’s nothing wrong with this. Carisi’s not expecting anything out of her. She figured that out really fast. He’s not her friend because he wants to sleep with her; he was her friend first, she’s certain of it.

“Anybody want to go bring this to Barba?” Benson’s poked her head outside her office for the first time in a bit and Rollins looks up and makes eye contact for a second with Carisi. He’s pale and twitchy, just for a second, and usually she’d tease him, but she’s just not up for it now. Carisi doesn’t look up to anything, not running errands for Barba and Liv, so she gets up to go before Liv can pick a least favorite child.

“Have fun Rollins. Stick around there for a minute.” Amanda nods. She’s not Barba’s biggest fan in the world but it beats sitting around watching her and Carisi get steadily more awkward. She wonders if Benson’s noticed. Amanda wonders what she thinks is going on.

She passes Carisi. He’s looking straight at his desk, but he looks up when she passes and smiles real quick.

She smiles back. “Catch you later, Detective.” 

He nods back. 

It doesn’t last long, them avoiding each other. They’re too much a part of each other’s life that they don’t even last a few days before they’re chatting like ever, but there’s a lot of awkwardness and Amanda knows that’s at least mostly from her. She knows he wasn’t trying to hide it from her. He’s been trying to tell her something for a while, she’s noticed, and she’s been brushing him off. 

So, they keep hanging out, at work, at her home, and they’re both avoiding talking about what they clearly should be talking about. Amanda’s never been the type to talk about her problems. She thinks maybe if she talked to the people she loved about what she was thinking, what she was feeling, then maybe things would work out better. If she talked to Kim, if she talked to Nick, things would have gone better.

Or maybe her sister would always be a disaster and she and Nick were always doomed. 

But her and Carisi, that’s nothing that can’t be fixed. She’s just furiously resentful that she’s the one that has to fix it. It’s not like she never talks about her feelings. She rants at him sometimes. There are things she doesn’t talk about--she doesn’t talk about Declan, because there’s nothing left to say, and she doesn’t talk about her family, because she never will, but she talks about everything else. About how Jesse’s been keeping her up at night, about criminals that really get to her, about her pains, her aches, that creepy guy at the convenience store who keeps looking at her weird (Carisi said he’d have a word with him if she wanted and was only possibly joking) and, one memorable time, when she was really drunk, she told him all about how much she missed Nick. How she wished he hadn’t gone off to California and left her here. How much she wanted him back with her.

And what, Carisi couldn’t tell her about some stupid little crush he’s gonna get over someday anyway? This isn’t on Amanda; this is his fault.

They’re at her home. Carisi’s rambling on about his sister’s Gina’s new boyfriend, “and Tommy couldn’t even believe he said that he gets up just--leaves the room--straight out and Bella’s trying her best not to just burst out laughing you could just tell and Gina, Gina is furious, you know how she gets, well you don’t know you never met her, but she gets all red in the face when she’s mad and she tells this guy, I mean this guy, who is just such a prick I don’t even know what she saw in him--” and she zones out looking at some far point in the room until she gets startled out of it by Jesse making a loud noise across the table. Carisi’s already got her though. “Aww come on there, angel.”

Carisi’s rocking Jesse back and forth and he’s been sending her these furtive looks like he’s been doing for weeks, for months, like there’s something he just can’t hold back anymore. “Anyway, like I was saying, Gina--” Then he stops, Jesse’s face muffled in his shirt, and she must look angry or lost or something because he’s looking at her all uncertain. “Somethin’ wrong, Rollins?”

She’s angry that she’s the one that has to bring this up. Amanda can’t believe that she’s the one that has to bring this up. “Is there something you want to tell me, Carisi?”

It comes out angry and even Jesse seems quiet for a second. Carisi’s just staring at her and all the fight’s out of him. He suddenly looks so stressed and tired that she’s guilty for ever bringing it up. They could have had a nice night.

“It’s not--I mean I know it’s not--” Carisi’s looking at her, frustrated and determined and she’s suddenly tensed up. “Yeah. There’s something I wanna tell you. Sure as heck sounds like you already figured it out. It’s not supposed to be this hard. To say this. People say it’s not supposed to be this hard but that’s just not true is it.”

Amanda’s sitting there. Waiting.

“Why I gotta say anything, anyway, Rollins?” He goes and sets Jesse down in her high chair. 

She’s still quiet. “I just don’t like you lying to me, Carisi.”

“Oh, f--” Carisi cuts himself off and Amanda’s only seen him this mad at perps before. “I’m not lying. I’m not a liar.” He pauses and takes a breathe. “Normally I’m doing...fine, Rollins. It’s just--” Carisi speaks in short, halting sentences and it’s so against how he usually talks, in long running sentences that fall over each other and more and it hurts her to hear him so hesitant. “Father Eugene. Talking to him brought back a lot of stuff that I thought I was over.”

And suddenly Amanda’s very confused.

“He just--hated himself so much Amanda. He hated himself so much that he let girls get assaulted. And I hated how much I related to him. Because I did--so much--I understood everything that he did and everything that he felt and I--I don’t like that about myself, Rollins. Not even a bit. I don’t want to hate myself. And I don’t, anymore, not really, so much, not the way he does. But I’m Catholic. And it’s hard, to get over stuff that you used to think is right. But you get it, right Rollins? I wasn’t purposefully lying or anything, it’s just hard to say.”

Carisi’s staring at her, like he’s expecting a reaction and she doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. She’s a detective--she can do this--she can understand perps; she can understand her partner. Carisi’s hiding something from her, something that he’s been trying to tell her. He’s a good actor, he’s a good liar, he relates to Father Eugene, he’s Catholic, he said something to Father Eugene that made the man want to give up all his information, he used to hate himself, he’s ashamed of himself, and he’s trying to get over it. And then, all at once, she understands.

“Oh...you’re…?” Bisexual? Gay? What is he trying to say? “You’re what?”

And she suddenly feels horribly betrayed. They’ve talked about his ex-girlfriends and his entire life and it’s clear--it’s so abundantly clear despite what he said that this is something that he’s been hiding from her. This is something that he’s known for a while, that he could have told her anytime. She keeps her mouth shut but she knows her eyes must be shining with something like anger.

Carisi’s a good detective too. “Or maybe you don’t know anything.” He pauses for a second. “That didn’t come out right. But you know, I think you and me have been having two different conversations. What did you think we were talking about, Rollins?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Carisi’s eyes are filled with desperation. He leans forward across the table. “I tried. So hard to like women, you wouldn’t even believe Rollins. And then I tried so hard not to like anyone and then someone like--” he seems to brace himself for a moment but he pushes ahead anyway. No one’s ever said Carisi isn’t brave. “Someone like Barba comes along and I realize I can’t. Not at all.”

Barba. That makes sense. So many things are starting to make sense. How twitchy he gets whenever Barba gets around. He follows him around like a puppy sometimes and she just thought ‘hero worship’ or ‘geez Carisi wants to be a lawyer’, but a crush makes sense. How weird he got when Amanda told him about her conversation with Fin. About how they weren’t each other’s type. What exactly did he think she told Fin?

This is a mess. And It's not like she doesn't get it. It's not like she's never looked twice at a girl. She remembered how happy she was with that cute brown haired friend of hers back in high school--used to follow her around like she wanted a mentor then got herself some jerk of a boyfriend. Broke Amanda's heart but she didn't figure out why for a while later. Not like she hasn't looked a girl since but that's all it's been. Looking. And she plenty likes guys. It's not like she has to fake it like it seems Carisi does if she's reading things right here. There's always been something stopping her, though. She’s never dated a woman after all.

She used to think you grow out of that stuff, sometimes. Amanda thought she grew out of it. But she remembers how she was when she first got to the squad. Following Liv around like she was the best thing in earth, even when Liv didn't give her the time of day. And then along came Nick and all that flew out the window. But--she remembers how she was with Liv. Wanting to impress her all the time. It wasn’t good for her. Amanda needs to stay away from her bosses. 

She thinks maybe she should tell Carisi. Solidarity or something. Make him feel less alone in this room. But it's caught in her throat and she knows why. It's because she's not sure; she's never been sure and if she isn't certain she can't say it. She'll say it the moment she is. Sometimes Amanda thinks she isn’t that brave.

“And Barba. He’s just. He’s so amazing, Rollins, really he is.” Carisi’s pleading with her and it’s uncomfortable. Amanda knows, when you start talking about something sometimes you just can’t stop. “I know ya don’t get on but I think he’s just--he’s everything I ever wanted. He’s so smart and dedicated and I--” Her heart plummets. She’s not ready to hear he’s in love with Barba. “I think he’s just the best person ever.”

She's suddenly really scared for Carisi. She's liked some older man or seven that she's known, that she's worked with, and it's never worked out, not a one, not even Nick and it's suddenly with her. Carisi's gonna get so hurt by the time this is over. His heart is gonna get smashed into little pieces on the floor and she's not gonna be able to put it back together. She doesn't trust Barba with Carisi's heart. 

“Not that he’d be interested. I mean I know--he isn’t--”

Oh she doubts that. She can’t imagine Barba’d not be interested in Carisi in some sort of way. Amanda just hopes it's in the same sort of way Carisi wants him.

“I don’t know about that, Sonny.” He looks up, eyes wide. Maybe because she’s not talked in a bit. Maybe because she called him by his first name. It seemed like a first name moment. “But if we’re going to talk about Barba’s better qualities, I’m going to need something stronger than water.” Carisi gives a surprised, sharp laugh and finally seems to calm down for the first time in what’s felt like days. He sends her a toothy grin. She shoots a grin back. 

Amanda gets up to go get something hard. She thinks she’s got whiskey somewhere in an upper cupboard. She moves and Carisi sits, looking like all the life and energy’s been drained out of him. 

Amanda thinks for a minute, as she pulls out several bottles of unopened wine. This isn’t anything she can’t deal with. There were many worse things he could have told her. There were many worse secrets he could have had. This was more like private than lying. She can deal with private, even if she never expected it from Carisi. Amanda feels herself relax for the first time in days.

Jesse seems to take that as an invitation to start crying her eyes out again. Amanda turns to grab her but Carisi’s already there, cooing over Jesse, holding her up and rocking her back and forth.

Amanda pours a generous bit of whiskey into a wine glass, because she’s nothing if not tacky, and pushes it toward Carisi. “Once you put down my daughter, this is yours.” She pours herself one with a bit more because it’s not like she has to drive tonight. “And you can tell me all about how Barba’s the love of your life.”

He turns bright red and it looks absolutely terrible on him. She grins. It’s not that she particularly wants to hear about the particulars of Carisi’s crush on Barba but she’s his friend and friends drink and talk about their problems and their crushes and everything else. She needs to know that he knows that’s okay.

After all, Amanda knows he’s done the same for her.

Amanda buys apology coffee on the way to work the next day, and thinks about writing a note on it. Something like ‘sorry I made you say all that stuff’ or ‘sorry I accidentally forced you into coming out to me it was an honest accident.’ In the end, she writes nothing and wanders in with the intent of putting it on Carisi’s desk and thinking nothing more about it. Instead, she finds an apology coffee already on her desk. On the bottom of it there’s a sticky post-it note that says ‘sorry I talked about Barba for three hours and yelled at you.’

She smirks and places the coffee in her hand on Carisi’s desk. Fin’s staring at her, looking between her at Carisi’s desk with a look on his face like he’s trying to figure out whether he cares enough to say anything. Apparently he does because he turns his head to the side and asks, “You two make up?”

Amanda turns away, moving back to her desk. “Wouldn’t know what you mean, Fin.”

“Sure,” he says, sounding exasperated, “whatever you say Rollins.”

She smiles at him, sweet as sugar. “Where’re we at with the case?”

And back to work she goes, coffee in hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired mostly by me projecting myself all over yet another character and Season 17 making it really, really easy to read Carisi as a repressed gay Catholic. 
> 
> Also inspired by how truly awful an experience coming out is and how fun of a character Amanda Rollins is. I didn't realize she was bisexual before writing this but now I know better.
> 
> If I could have put Barba and Amaro in here without it being awkward or forced, I would have.


End file.
